new article: yes, a new article by yours truly will appear on freaky trigger by tomorrow (? possibly? mebbe?) but as a valued vs&l reader, i'll afford you the opportunity to read the...ready?...first paragraph here before you can see it anywhere else! readership has its rewards!

for the record, it's a review of mercury rev's all is dream, which is released in this country tomorrow. (and while there, since it's my birthday saturday, and since a boy only turns 24 once, why not buy me something as well?) without further chicanery, that opening paragraph...

With their 1995 album See You on the Other Side, Mercury Rev created a world for the listener to inhabit. It was a world where adagios and allegros lived together in peace, where the boundaries of the staff were not strictly enforced, where tones were free to be polygamous; sounds of different colors, genres, and creeds coexisted harmoniously. World building is a difficult thing to do and takes a lot out of a band – don’t believe me, just ask the Lord – and maintaining it is nearly as difficult, so for their follow-up, 1998’s Deserter’s Songs, they staked out one particular corner, an America romanticized, as only a Canadian can do, by Robbie Robertson, only more inhabitable and, therefore, less realistic. Deserter’s Songs, whose childlike sense of awe and wonder concealed a masterful sense of composition, hearkened back to an era when there were still frontiers unexplored and riches undiscovered. As it begins, All is Dream, the new album, is what happens when one gets lost in the unlit backwoods of America, when astonishment gives way to fright, when the fairy tales are stripped away and the nightmare sets in. On All is Dream, Mercury Rev leave the confines of their upstate New York estate, with the listener in tow, only to find themselves lost in a world of their own making.

appetite whetted? can't wait for MORE? keep your eyes -- oh, like you need to be told! -- on ft.